02 October 2005

Armchair Safari

What an extraordinary example of the outlandish opportunities the digital revolution creates...I'm sitting in my office in London on a Sunday evening. It's dark and raining outside. On my computer is a dark but visible fullscreen image of an African elephant lying on its side in a waterhole in the Mashutu Game reserve, Botswana.

It's night time there too. The bugs are flitting across the screen as I watch and listen to this elephant, in real-time, thousands of miles away in southern Africa, rythmically raise its trunk up out of the water and lazily splash it down again. Just a buzzing of insects and splashing of water - one of the most relaxing things I've seen for ages.

I was astonished to trawl through the daily photos taken by the Mars landers as they crawled their way around the Martian landscape millions of miles away, but somehow it is not as amazing as the National Geographic's Africacam